I like the tone. It feels to me like NNT’s way of putting skin in the game. Now that he’s in Rome (book tour) perhaps there’s a chance we’ll have our offended economist fisticuffs  dust-up.

Antifragile continues the Black Swan theme but the arrogant tone has been taken up a notch.

As with Taleb’s other books, there are interesting ideas here. His main point is this: there is no word in the English language to mean the opposite of fragile. You might think that “resilient” or “robust” is the opposite of fragile but that’s not right. A system is fragile if it is sensitive to errors. A system is resilient if it is insensitive to errors. A system is antifragile if it improves with errors.

To understand antifragility, think of things that lead to improvement by trial-and-error. Evolution is an example. Entrepreneurship is another.

Generally, top-down, bureaucratic things tend to be fragile. Bottom-up, decentralized things tend to be anti-fragile. He refers to meddlers who want to impose centralized — and hence fragile — decision making on people as “fragilistas.” I love that word.

I like his ideas about antifragility. I share his dislike for centralized decision-making, bureaucrats, (as well as his dislike of Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman). So I really wanted to like this book.

via Review of “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb (a.k.a. Doc Savage) « Normal Deviate.